Vote down?

Because of the usability-issue (braille-reader, screen-reader) you can use the abbr-tag to describe the use of your font-char, therefore most screen-readers will read-out the title-param of abbr and the user gets the meaning of the ‘icon-character’.

I’m not 100% sure, but as it seams NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver for iOS this works — on Mac OS X (unfortunately) not…